One of my favorite local conferences is coming up this weekend, namely LinuxFest NorthWest in Bellingham, Washington. The range of sessions has always been somewhat unpredictable, but this year features a healthy number of talks dedicated to developing web applications with the main open source frameworks. I figure it will be a good chance for me to get up to speed on any new developments I missed out on, as well as meeting people who are working in the area locally.

Perl 5 core development was in a downward spiral for a couple of years. Releases happened less and less frequently, the number of contributors dropped and the general outlook was getting worse and worse. This is the story how the downward trend has been reversed and how fun, optimism and even excitement has returned to Perl 5 language development.

"Open Data" has been the flavor of the year. While ten years ago most people were content to access their favorite government-issued pamphlets and documents as PDF documents on the web, a few people knew that there were untold applications locked within the encrypted data in those documents. In the past year or so, many jurisdictions, most notably at the city level, have been releasing sets of raw data.

After meeting with and sitting in on speaker sessions at OSBC 2010, here are the top quotes we heard – from speakers, audience participants, and other contacts. And what to take away from it. (Some identities have been protected.)

Our March developer poll generated some interesting results showing that developers, managers and architects are all concerned with the proper licensing of open source for externally distributed applications.

If you have researched open source software, even just a little, you’ve likely encountered two distinct worldviews:

believers

skeptics

Believers celebrate open source as free, collaborative code. In this paradigm, open source software isn’t just a free licensing model; it is a movement for building better, more flexible software. But, that’s just one side of the story. Open source skeptics raise compelling counterarguments for why open source software and the enterprise don’t mix.